Rob Patterson

Radio Needs Diversity

With Michael Powell stepping down as Federal Communications
Commission chairman and Commissioner Kevin Martin stepping up into
the post, let's turn on the radio. Not today's broadcast radio, mind
you. For whatever differences the news media has delineated between
Powell and Martin, a former Bush campaign lawyer and economic
adviser, business as usual will go on over the AM and FM bands.

And business as it usually goes in today's America means that the
FCC won't make all that much difference on most of what we hear on
broadcast radio (other than even less of what may have the whiff of
obscenity). The medium has already been sold down the river to
conglomerates whose research, consultants and micro-management of
strictly delineated musical formats means we get a handful of
listening choices depending on your cultural wardrobe and tastes.

Alas, I can remember when music radio was a wholly different
animal. In my youth, Top 40 stations didn't conform to specific
genres and formats. It was all about whether a song was a hit,
regardless whether it was pop, rock, soul, folk, country or even a
novelty record. I dearly remember a time when you'd hear the Beatles
rubbing up against the Supremes following Dean Martin with Johnny
Cash or Skeeter Davis rounding out the set. Music was music on Top
40, not adult contemporary, urban, smooth jazz or alternative.

Later in the decade, the FM band birthed free-form underground
radio and then the original album radio, where at its best you might
hear the Beatles again and then Herbie Hancock or even Mozart. Now FM
is segmented and targeted into the sort of formats mentioned
above.

Much of the new music you hear is determined at the corporate home
office. And disc jockeys, who actually used to spin discs and relate
to their listeners, are now known as "air personalities" even on the
formats that don't let them have personality.

Yeah, satellite radio is emerging to play music you won't hear on
broadcast, but this new world is all about niches and narrowcasting.
But no longer can you hear radio where, style be damned, if a song is
a hit then it's a hit. (Yeah, payola greased the wheels, but it never
bought a dog single a position at the top of the charts.) And to top
it all off, most of the albums made by today's musical artists
conform to much the same narrow stylistic focus that contemporary
radio follows.

But I recently got a new taste of what once was on the album Heard
It On The X by Los Super 7. It's the third in a series of ever
changing musical summits -- the first of which won a Grammy -- among
roots music musicians and singers, originally conceived as a salute
to Mexican-American music. But this time out, it straddles the
US/Mexican border where from the 1930s into the 1980s, border blaster
stations licensed in Mexico beamed music you wouldn't hear even on
America's still growing and relatively open commercial stations.

The way it goes seamlessly from Chicano music to black blues,
blue-eyed soul, Western swing and rock'n'roll reminds of that earlier
time when the song, not the style, made the difference. In my house,
that's how music is and should be. The songs are from legends like
Bob Wills and Buddy Holly as well as regional stars of yore such as
San Antonio's Sunny & The Sunliners, sung, respectively, by such
great voices as Lyle Lovett, Rodney Crowell and Delbert McClinton.
And then there's brilliant matches like Tejano music star Ruben Ramos
singing the ZZ Top-penned title tune.

In an era when albums are a few maybe hits (to be downloaded) with
filler (to be suffered or ignored), from cut one to 12, every song on
Heard It On The X plays like a hit, begging repeat listens that woo
you even more. How many albums can you say that about these days?

It pays tribute to the spirit of border radio, which, for all its
openness to hillbillies, bluesmen and young rock rebels, also was the
province of quacks, scammers and preachers both divinely sincere as
well as possibly downright evil. But I'll take that any day over guys
in suits poring over data and surveys to determine what they think
people want. And by covering a rainbow of ethnic origins and styles,
the album reminds how the radio we have lost was far more about
freedom, liberty and democracy than what's attached to those buzz
words these days.

If there were high-power radio stations that would play Heard It
On The X, it'd likely be a hit. And no matter how many hear and even
buy it, it's already one of this year's most historic releases (as
well as historical in its music and extensive liner notes).

It tunes the notion of radio back to a time when, rather than
programmers worrying about something causing listeners to tune out,
many of us tuned in to hear something new and something different --
to hear America singing in all its diverse and democratic glory. That
musical spirit lives again on Heard It On The X.

Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin,
Texas. Email orca@io.com.